404 é Miscellanies. 
ing is indeed forcibly felt, but the effect is chiefly confined to the 
epidermis. 
If gases have little effect in the production of cold, it is not so 
with vapors, whose conductibility and capacity for heat are much 
greater. I have therefore thought that if a permanent liquid,— 
ether, for example—could be placed under the same condition of 
expansibility as liquefied gases, we might obtain a frigorific effect 
much greater than that procured by liquefied carbonic acid. 'Toac- 
complish this, ether must be rendered explosible, and this I have 
easily effected by mixing it with liquid carbonic acid. In this inti- 
mate combination of the two liquids, which dissolve each other in 
all proportions, ether ceases to be a permanent liquid under atmos- 
pheric pressure ; it becomes expansible like a liquefied gas, still pre- 
serving its properties as a vapor—viz. its geass: and pene 
for caloric. 
The effects produced by a blowpipe fed by explosible ether are 
remarkable: a few seconds are sufficient to congeal fifty grammes of 
mercury in a glass capsule. If we expose a finger to the jet which 
escapes from this veritable blowpipe of frost, the sensation is quite 
intolerable, and seems to extend much farther from the point of con- 
tact than with the liquid jet. 
I propose to replace ether by carburet of sulphur, which will in 
all probability produce still more striking effects.—(Annales de 
Chim. Decem.) 
5. Solidification of Carbonic Acid,* by M. Tuitorter.—lI had 
the honor, at the last session, to state to the Academy the phenome- 
na which accompany the liquefaction of carbonic acid gas: I now 
announce the fact, important to science, of the solidification of this 
gas. This first instance of a gas becoming solid and concrete, is so 
much the more remarkable, as it relates to a gas which requires the 
most powerful mechanical action to attain liquefaction, and which 
resumes with greater rapidity its first form when the compression is | 
removed. 
Gaseous under the common temperature and pressure, and liquid 
at zero, under a pressure of 36 atmospheres, carbonic acid becomes 
solid at a temperature about the hundredth degree (Cent.) below 
melting ice, and retains this new condition for several minutes in the 
open air, and without the necessity of any compression. 
* Mentioned in the last No. of this Journal, p. 163, but the details are now given. 
